When it comes to living life to its fullest, Rosalind Russell's character Auntie Mame is still the silver screen's exemplar. And Mame, the role Russell (1907–1976) would always be remembered for, embodies the rich and rewarding life Bernard F. Dick reveals in the first biography of this Golden Age star, Forever Mame: The Life of Rosalind Russell. Drawing on personal interviews and information from the archives of Russell and her producer-husband Frederick Brisson, Dick begins with Russell's childhood in Waterbury, Connecticut, and chronicles her early attempts to achieve recognition after graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Frustrated by her inability to land a lead in a Broadway show, she headed for Hollywood in 1934 and two years later played her first starring role, the title character in Craig’s Wife. Dick discusses all of her films along with her triumphal return to Broadway, first in the musical Wonderful Town and later in Auntie Mame. Forever Mame details Russell's social circle of such stars as Loretta Young, Cary Grant, and Frank Sinatra. It traces an extraordinary career, ending with Russell's courageous battle against the two diseases that eventually caused her death: rheumatoid arthritis and cancer. Russell devoted her last years to campaigning for arthritis research. So successful was she in her efforts to alert lawmakers to this crippling disease that a leading San Francisco research center is named after her.

Lily and Roseùfeminine names from the world of flowers Jordan and Josephùa strong pair of J names rich with religious meaning Charles, Lucie, and Alexandreùa trio of timeless names from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens Choosing the perfect name for a baby is hard enough; choosing complimentary names for multiples and siblings can prove even harder! This book presents more than 10,000 such names. This one-of-a-kind moniker manual provides parents with unique naming strategies and clever ideas for combinations, including name pairings inspired by: rhyme and meter, alliteration, great literature, music, religious beliefs, and more. With pronunciation guides, etymological information, and word meanings, this unique collection of baby names is all parents need to bless their babies with perfect names!

After a coal mine explosion kills her father in 1922, pretty little Mary Margaret “Mame” Blackwell is not willing to accept her mother’s hardscrabble plan for farming burley tobacco in rural West Virginia, but trying to survive in a nearly deserted coal mining town without a father in the early 1900s is anything but easy. Mame yearns for a way out of the sleepy little town of Beckley. When Mame eagerly leaves home on her first trip to Charleston at age 19, she meets tobacco heir Clint Paddington and sees her chance to move up in the world. Unaware at first of their families’ shared connection to tragedy, Mame makes wild, naïve choices that expose both families to even deeper dangers for generations to come. Watch the damage escalate in this gritty Southern saga as ambition and romance go awry, adding betrayal, kidnapping, rape, and even murder to the mining tragedy. Do children inherit the sins of their fathers? Do dark forces walk the earth? Will Mame’s secrets push her to madness? Or will her solid roots in the coal mining country help her survive her mistakes, or, at least, be forgiven of them?

Embodied Nostalgia is a collection of interlocking case studies that focus on how social dance in musical theatre brings forth the dancer on stage as a site of embodied history, cultural memory, and nostalgia, and asks what social dance is doing performatively, dramaturgically, and critically in musical theatre. The case studies in this volume are all Broadway musicals set during the Jazz Age (1910-1950), however, performed and produced after that time, creating a spectrum of nostalgic impulses that are interrogated for social and political resonance and meaning. All reflect the fractures or changes in the social dance when brought to the stage and expose the complexities of the embodied nostalgia – broadly interpreted as the physicalizing of community memories, longings, and historical meaning – the dances carry with them. Particular attention is focused on the Black ownership of the social dances and the subsequent appropriation, cultural theft, and forgotten legacies. By approaching musical theatre through this lens of social dance––always already deeply connected to notions of class and race––and the politics of choreography therein, a unique and necessary method to describing, discussing, and critically evaluating the body in motion in musical theatre is put forth.